Winter Reading: New Report on OER & the #textbookbroke Campaign

With another semester on the horizon, we’ve been busy collecting some of the highlights from the past few weeks and bookmarking some things we’re looking forward to in 2016.

The #textbookbroke campaign asks students: What would you do with a couple extra hundred dollars a semester? Read more here.

Spotlight on one of the many advantages of teaching with open materials. Books can be updated instantly, which means teachers can integrate current events to make content more relevant (via District Administration).

Ian Whittaker, an analyst at Liberum, says the U.S. textbook business has an existential problem, not a cyclical one as Pearson has argued. Students who can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars for books and are turning to sharing and rental plans, or even open-source, free books (via Bloomberg).

A new report form OER Hub was released, exploring the use and impact of OER in British Columbia: read it here.